REVIEW / Her memories are intact after time spent as junkie, hooker

Published 4:00 am, Monday, December 11, 2006

By the time she hit her early 20s, Kate Holden was hooked on heroin, bounced in and out of rehabilitation centers, and worked as a prostitute in her native Australia. She had taken her solid, middle-class upbringing, and her undergraduate classics degree, and embarked upon an undeniably sordid existence.

Her memoir, "In My Skin," provides an unflinching look at her experiences in the 1990s with drug addiction and prostitution. The book, filled with descriptions of the fixes she had and the tricks she turned, is long on details, culled from journals she kept then. It is short, however, on insight or empathy.

Holden, who lives in Melbourne, casts herself from the start as the good girl gone bad.

"During the day," she writes, "I was a mild, neat bookstore assistant, chatting with the local matrons and book groups, exchanging gossip with my colleagues, handling money, making phone calls, straightening my skirt.

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"At home I was a nice, polite, middle-class girl living with her parents in an old haven of innocence. At James's, I was the awkward girlfriend, not quite cool enough for his housemates. And in the city, I was a swaggering junkie in dark streets." The contrasts are stark.

With an ear for rhythm and language, the author creates occasionally lyrical prose. Passages on her encounters with strange men in brothels and parked cars are well-crafted.

"I touched people's bodies," she continues, "they touched mine, we were alone in a room. Like a masseur, like a dentist, like a beauty therapist. Yes, but I opened my body, they touched me there. Like a doctor. Yes, but inside. Yes ..." She hangs tight to specifics, unfazed by harsh recollections or graphic images.

What Holden doesn't do, however, is offer enough insight into her condition or situation. She fails to dig as deep as she should when and where it matters most. As a result, she fails to earn our compassion and understanding. We find it difficult to sympathize.

The author refers to her family, for instance, and the kindness they showed through the years. She dedicates this book, in fact, to her parents and her younger sister. But she provides an incomplete portrait of their lives together.

We don't get a clear sense of the ways in which Holden's drug addiction affected the people around her who were clean. Her parents worried, as was expected. They kicked her out of their house at one point, only to invite her back months later. Her sister gave her cash. "I blushed at her trust," Holden writes. "I reassured her the money was for groceries." What were they thinking, though? Did her parents feel hopeless? Did they blame themselves for her misfortunes? How did they cope with her habit? How did they deal with their pain? Did her younger sister feel sorry for her? Giving these individuals stronger voices would have given the memoir additional perspectives.

Holden doesn't present a thorough enough investigation into her own true self, either. She documents her impressions and private encounters quite casually. She remembers the clothes her clients wore, for example, the different looks on their faces, and the sexual favors they sought.

But she seems to shy away from potentially larger issues: Did Holden believe she was rebelling against her childhood and her education? Did she resent what she had had? Was that the appeal? Did she need to betray her past? In hindsight, was she ashamed of these things she had done? Was she regretful? What were her lessons learned? In other words, why should we care?

Incidents leading up to what would become the author's ultimate recovery also seem too tidy or taut a series of events. Just as easily as Holden fell into drugs and prostitution, she seemed to fall out. The reality had to have been harder. But she addresses relatively briefly the trip that would forever change her.

Unlike other memoirs that talk at length about personal struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and rehabilitation, Holden's book appears to end only when the rest of her life actually begins. The wisdom and redemption that made San Francisco resident Cupcake Brown's autobiography "A Piece of Cake," for example, such the inspiration are unfortunately missing here.

That Holden manages to save herself is remarkable. It always is. Without further detailing the healing process, however, her story reads simply like a lurid confessional, uncompelling and insubstantial.